Like surrealist poet Will Alexander, Jayne Cortez often uses her poetry to engage with historical figures and events that are ignored by the bigger history books. In Coagulations (1984), Cortez highlights the historical significance of lesser-known figures who fought for political justice in poems like “Give Me the Red on the Black of the Bullet (For Claude Reece Jr.)” or “For the Brave Young Students in Soweto.” In “For the Poets (Christopher Okigbo & Henry Dumas), Cortez writes:

Because they’ll try and shoot us
like they shot Henry Dumas huh
because we massacre each other
and Christopher Okigbo is dead…uh-huh.

Cortez’s poems have some slam-like elements, but with a sort of incantative call-and-answer rhythm, often mixed with disjunct, violent surrealist images. These qualities often work well to underscore her themes of political and sexual violence. Sometimes, though, the poems do seem to get overly didactic, losing some of their artistic energy. “If the Drum is a Woman,” for example, simply uses the drum as a metaphor for a woman:

why are you choking your drum
why are you raping your drum
why are yous aying disrespectful things
to your mother drum your sister drum

in a way that seems so obvious as to be unnecessary. Still, I admire Cortez’s incorporation of traditional rituals and mythologies alongside real historical events, enacting a recuperation of lost, forgotten or suppressed cultural and artistic practices. Coagulations even ends with a glossary / dictionary that translates words from African languages and introduces us to the names of gods from places around the world.

Cortez point to poetry and art as mediums that light up the liminal spaces between official history and cultural memory, “moving in half steps toward / center of the darkness of the dot,” as she writes in “When I Look at Wilfredo Lam’s Paintings.”

As in the works of many surrealist women, the speaker in Cortez’s poems is often quickly transformed from human to animal to plant. In “I Am New York City,” Cortez writes:

my sideshow of open beaks
…..in my nose of soot
in my ox bled eyes
in my ear of saturday night special

In this poem, the speaker even becomes part of the landscape of the city. Instead of the us-them distinction often drawn in history books, Cortez’s poetry points towards a union and melding, revealing the false dichotomies often imposed between between people, histories and nature.

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